For a Future Burning Brightly - MERLIN - PG
Title: For a Future Burning Brightly
Author: anamuan
Fandom/Pairing: Merlin; Gwen/Arthur, Merlin/Arthur
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,432
Warnings: Err, character death.
A/N: This is born out of reading far too many King Arthur legend-related wikipedia articles at work one week. You know what's depressing shit? That's some depressing shit.
Thanking Dani and shenron118 for the beta! Any mistakes extant are mine.
"Merlin," Gwen says, and something in her tone stops Merlin short, because he knows her, and she doesn't sound like that: panic forced down tight into her gut, worry bone deep, held in. "I can't stop the bleeding," she says, and Merlin's world tilts dizzyingly because he doesn't need to ask whose.
Gaius long dead, they have no one to replace him. Gwen does her best, and no one would ever suggest the Queen's attentions less than sufficient in most matters, but the simple truth is that few have Gaius's skill. They’ve felt his lack. Not for the first time, Merlin wishes that Gaius were still alive-for his skill, and for his unflappable demeanor, because when Merlin and Gwen reach the temporary infirmary, it's true. Arthur is bleeding to death.
"I won't let it happen," Merlin says, fierce, defiant, and oh, so delusional. "I won't. I won't. I won't. I won't." And his blue eyes flash gold, and his hands glow blue, but the bleeding hole in Arthur's chest won't heal.
He’s exhausted, like they all are, but he doesn’t feel it for the first time in days, weeks, pushed away by desperation. Merlin pours all of his strength into it, trying to knit flesh, the fine mesh of blood vessels, trying to force healing with magic where ordinary skill has failed.
"I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't," he says, repeats it like a spell, a prayer. Arthur’s breath continues to rattle in his throat, wet and awful. His face is pale, grey, and his lips unnaturally red-traces of blood where it shouldn’t be. Merlin redoubles his efforts, but it’s a losing battle the way none of their other lost causes ever have been.
And when the last of the life slips from Arthur's eyes, and the last of the breath from his lips, Merlin's eyes flash brighter gold yet, and he immolates them both, a blazing bonfire of grief. Mordred, pierced but living-whose wounds had been dressed because Arthur had never been one to let even his enemies suffer needlessly-screams and ignites as well, his own magic spent and unable to save him.
It's vengeance, and nothing else. Death for life only holds true in one direction.
Morgana breaks then. She doesn’t speak for months, not until the baby is born, a boy with Gwen’s hair and Arthur’s eyes. She’s like a ghost, all but withdrawn from court entirely. If people whisper about her like they had when Arthur had welcomed her back, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t care. Nothing matters.
Gwen barely holds it together; she feels like a house in a storm, beaten down on all sides, lashed by wind and weather. Lancelot becomes her right hand, her military arm, but refugees come in fits and bursts from outlying villages as they’re overwhelmed by bandits or brigands or neighbouring kingdoms sensing weakness. The refugees call Gwen regal and distant when she can’t hear them, her grief and her power worn about her like a cloak. She doesn’t smile, but subjects don’t look for happiness in their rulers-just for the absence of fear. Gwen is not afraid of anything any more.
She names her child Andrew, for strength. They need a fighter.
~
Merlin remembers what the dragon told him, about how Mordred would be Arthur’s doom if he didn’t kill the boy. But he’d been a boy then, such a small, scared child, and Merlin never wanted to be the kind of person who could casually kill a child for potential future crimes.
Merlin cannot speak to the motivations of a little boy, but the adult is certainly trying to prove the dragon right. Merlin dearly wishes this were one of the times the dragon had lied to him.
Merlin is distracted when Arthur takes the blow, eyes pulled away when Gawain gets a dagger in the thigh and goes down with a shout. He throws a burst of magic at the chest of the fighter who owned the dagger, and watches a moment longer to make sure he doesn't get back up and that Gawain does--and when he looks back, he can't find Arthur in the throng. He spots him just as he falls, and every second it takes Merlin to make Arthur's side takes an eternity because there's no way Merlin can be there fast enough. Mordred's already down, bleeding slowly from a gash in his side, a cut on his forehead. He does not move.
Arthur is down on one knee, struggling to regain his feet before anyone takes advantage of his weakened stance. The edges of a hole in his chain mail glint wet and red, and he grits his teeth through a cough as he uses Merlin's shoulder to lever himself upright.
"You're hurt," Merlin says, stupidly, obviously, because Arthur is still putting far too much weight on him in order to stand.
"I'm fine; it's nothing," Arthur says, but he staggers even as he says it. A horse cuts in front of them both, and Merlin readies another magic bolt against the threat; but it's Morgana, in battle dress.
"Give me Arthur," she commands. "Go pull down Mordred's standard. He is fallen and his army will pull back when they see that."
She pulls Arthur up onto the horse in front of her, and it's worrying the way Arthur does not protest the indignity of riding like an idiot or an invalid. Morgana pivots the horse away, and Merlin uses magic to snatch the standard from atop its pike. Merlin may trample it into the mud of the battle field with a little more vigour than is strictly necessary.
Merlin turns as the battle starts to disengage. Ten meters away, Morgana rears the horse, and has it bring its full weight down on someone who'd sidled up to try to take advantage of the horse's double burden. Merlin can hear the impact from where he stands. For an instant, she looks like a goddess of war, with her hair so dark and her skin so pale. And then she's off across the field to the castle again, Mordred's army breaking around her, and Arthur's own falling back in steppes as a rear-guard; and Morgana is just the King's adopted sister, riding urgently home.
~
“The baby, I think we’ll keep it,” Gwen tells Arthur one morning. She’d been showing for a few weeks, but no one had said anything for fear of a jinx or a curse or just atrocious luck. It was not a good time for Albion, and pregnancies were always so chancy in the early months: so easy to lose the child, so easy to lose the mother. Acknowledging the pregnancy meant that the most uncertain time had passed, that Gwen might bear to term.
“We’ll have a girl!” Arthur says, clearly delighted. “With a smile like her mother’s.” Arthur wants a girl so he can learn to dote on a child, afraid his experiences with Uther will overwhelm if he doesn't practice first. Arthur grew into a good man because his father was one, at his heart, but he doesn’t want his children to have to dig for that certainty. Morgana was a good woman despite Urther’s worst mistakes.
Morgana’s expression goes strange and distant for a moment, as though she’s listening very hard to something far away. “It’s a boy,” she says.
“But I want a girl. Merlin, make it so,” Arthur says, mock petulant and playful in a way none have seen him be in many months-not since Mordred had brought active war to their gates.
“Shouldn’t you want a boy?” Gwen asks him, before Merlin can say it doesn’t matter, that magic doesn’t work that way. “Take care of the succession early and not have to worry about things as your father did?”
“We’ll have time for succession later,” Arthur tells her, and all their laughter rings like bells through the castle’s stone halls.
“Name it Morgan,” Merlin says, solemn, not joining them in their cheer, and Morgana, Arthur, and Gwen laugh all the harder for his dour delivery of the suggestion that they name the child for brightness.
~
Mordred will not take peace. Arthur continues to sue for it, long after even his most trusted advisors have abandoned the course, saying it will only make him look weak.
“It will make me look like I want peace,” Arthur retorts. “We will press the battle no less fiercely for it. Let them come if they think us weak.” And Arthur fights more fiercely than any other person on the field of battle, hounding Mordred so sorely it is difficult to remember who has laid siege to whom.
~
Albion flourishes under Arthur. It was a prosperous kingdom under Uther; he cared about his people and their ability to make a living in the trades they chose. Under Arthur, Albion comes into its golden age, as the dragon had tempted or promised Merlin so long ago.
Years pass, and Arthur marries Gwen in the winter, despite all the traditions and superstitions it flies directly in the face of.
"She's not nobility," Arthur laughs if pressed about it, "So I doubt summer-luck will have much bearing either." He says it with a lot of bravado, but Gwen remembers anxious days spent in consultation with Morgana about how much of the tradition about summer marriages from the old religion had a real practical purpose, and how much was irrelevant and could be done without.
Enough, it turns out. What speaks to Morgana most is that no one in the castle, none of the courtiers, none of the ladies or knights grumble or complain at this departure from the way things always were; no one has anything to say about traditions or laws or expectations, the ones that Uther had understood so well and that a much younger Arthur had felt so constrained by.
More than that, no one at all, not just the ladies and lords titled for merit, but the old ones as well, and the servants and vassals so long concerned by propriety, spoke a word against Gwen's coronation, making a peasant a Queen in power as well as name.
~
Arthur sends for Morgana as his father lies on his deathbed. He is dying. Gaius says there is nothing that can be done. You loved him once, and I think he loves you still, in his own misguided way. Please come, reads the note he sends out. Arthur isn't sure if she will come or not, but he hopes.
"She has worked for years for the downfall of this kingdom!" his advisors--Uther's advisors--shout at him. "She has tried to kill Uther with her own hand!"
"She is as much a daughter to Uther as I have been a son. She will have a place here if she wants it, for it is hers already."
"Your father the King has banished her a traitor!"
"Yes, he did," says Arthur, and that is the end of it.
Morgana does come. Uther, dying, does not remember all the bad blood, does not remember her betrayal, her banishment. He does not remember much clearly near the end. Instead, he remembers better, earlier days, and he grasps her hand weakly in his own, and says, "Morgana. You grow more beautiful every day. Your father would be proud to see- I- The best thing that has ever happened to me is to have had you in my court, as family." And Morgana, once so angry she was unmoved by his clear happiness and relief to have found her whole and alive after a year of searching, cries at his passing.
Not a week after Uther dies, knights begin to converge on Camelot. Some travel hundreds of miles to pledge to Arthur their loyalty. Arthur knights Lancelot and Gawain the day they arrive, and laughs for the first time since his father’s death when Merlin reveals that Gawain had always been a noble, in secret, so the knighting was unnecessary. He knights any of the companions they’d brought with them that aren’t of noble birth as well, trusting his friends’ judgment in character. Arthur keeps training his knights himself, though it’s not the job for a king.
Arthur lifts the ban on magic, but he does not promote Merlin to his official court magician until months later out of a twisted sense of amusement. Then a knight visiting for tournament tries to make Merlin fetch his boots, since he’s just a house servant. It’s funny when Arthur does it on purpose, but unacceptable when it’s accidental, and the next day sees the installment of a magician in Arthur’s court.
Morgana stays, because she is asked to. Morgana knows people gossip about her behind her back in ways they never had when she’d lived there when Uther was king. She knows it’s vicious and malicious and probably more deserved than misinformation and untruth have a right to be. She ignores it and tries to get Gwen to do the same. Arthur has long since realized that trying to confront rumour does nothing but spread it faster, but Gwen has always had a softer heart and takes blows to her loved ones hardest of all. Gauis welcomes her back like a favourite granddaughter, steadfastly ignoring the transgressions of decades and injecting arch counterarguments to any word he hears against her.
Merlin, Morgana tries to avoid as much as possible, because of all the complicated history between them. He’d known to distrust her when no one else thought to suspect, and though her shifted allegiance was born partially out of his betrayal of her, a sacrifice he'd deemed acceptable for the greater good, Morgana cannot blame him if he chooses to mistrust her still. It takes her many months to realize that Merlin holds no magical shields or defenses around her at all; it takes no time after that for Morgana to understand that leaving Arthur unguarded is the same as leaving open a path to Merlin's heart, a trust untold and unrivalable.
It's a new future, one Morgana, Merlin, the dragon would never have been able to predict, something full of hope and home and promise, and it stretches out before them like bright red and gold banners, crisp with wind.
Author: anamuan
Fandom/Pairing: Merlin; Gwen/Arthur, Merlin/Arthur
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,432
Warnings: Err, character death.
A/N: This is born out of reading far too many King Arthur legend-related wikipedia articles at work one week. You know what's depressing shit? That's some depressing shit.
Thanking Dani and shenron118 for the beta! Any mistakes extant are mine.
"Merlin," Gwen says, and something in her tone stops Merlin short, because he knows her, and she doesn't sound like that: panic forced down tight into her gut, worry bone deep, held in. "I can't stop the bleeding," she says, and Merlin's world tilts dizzyingly because he doesn't need to ask whose.
Gaius long dead, they have no one to replace him. Gwen does her best, and no one would ever suggest the Queen's attentions less than sufficient in most matters, but the simple truth is that few have Gaius's skill. They’ve felt his lack. Not for the first time, Merlin wishes that Gaius were still alive-for his skill, and for his unflappable demeanor, because when Merlin and Gwen reach the temporary infirmary, it's true. Arthur is bleeding to death.
"I won't let it happen," Merlin says, fierce, defiant, and oh, so delusional. "I won't. I won't. I won't. I won't." And his blue eyes flash gold, and his hands glow blue, but the bleeding hole in Arthur's chest won't heal.
He’s exhausted, like they all are, but he doesn’t feel it for the first time in days, weeks, pushed away by desperation. Merlin pours all of his strength into it, trying to knit flesh, the fine mesh of blood vessels, trying to force healing with magic where ordinary skill has failed.
"I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't, I won't," he says, repeats it like a spell, a prayer. Arthur’s breath continues to rattle in his throat, wet and awful. His face is pale, grey, and his lips unnaturally red-traces of blood where it shouldn’t be. Merlin redoubles his efforts, but it’s a losing battle the way none of their other lost causes ever have been.
And when the last of the life slips from Arthur's eyes, and the last of the breath from his lips, Merlin's eyes flash brighter gold yet, and he immolates them both, a blazing bonfire of grief. Mordred, pierced but living-whose wounds had been dressed because Arthur had never been one to let even his enemies suffer needlessly-screams and ignites as well, his own magic spent and unable to save him.
It's vengeance, and nothing else. Death for life only holds true in one direction.
Morgana breaks then. She doesn’t speak for months, not until the baby is born, a boy with Gwen’s hair and Arthur’s eyes. She’s like a ghost, all but withdrawn from court entirely. If people whisper about her like they had when Arthur had welcomed her back, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t care. Nothing matters.
Gwen barely holds it together; she feels like a house in a storm, beaten down on all sides, lashed by wind and weather. Lancelot becomes her right hand, her military arm, but refugees come in fits and bursts from outlying villages as they’re overwhelmed by bandits or brigands or neighbouring kingdoms sensing weakness. The refugees call Gwen regal and distant when she can’t hear them, her grief and her power worn about her like a cloak. She doesn’t smile, but subjects don’t look for happiness in their rulers-just for the absence of fear. Gwen is not afraid of anything any more.
She names her child Andrew, for strength. They need a fighter.
~
Merlin remembers what the dragon told him, about how Mordred would be Arthur’s doom if he didn’t kill the boy. But he’d been a boy then, such a small, scared child, and Merlin never wanted to be the kind of person who could casually kill a child for potential future crimes.
Merlin cannot speak to the motivations of a little boy, but the adult is certainly trying to prove the dragon right. Merlin dearly wishes this were one of the times the dragon had lied to him.
Merlin is distracted when Arthur takes the blow, eyes pulled away when Gawain gets a dagger in the thigh and goes down with a shout. He throws a burst of magic at the chest of the fighter who owned the dagger, and watches a moment longer to make sure he doesn't get back up and that Gawain does--and when he looks back, he can't find Arthur in the throng. He spots him just as he falls, and every second it takes Merlin to make Arthur's side takes an eternity because there's no way Merlin can be there fast enough. Mordred's already down, bleeding slowly from a gash in his side, a cut on his forehead. He does not move.
Arthur is down on one knee, struggling to regain his feet before anyone takes advantage of his weakened stance. The edges of a hole in his chain mail glint wet and red, and he grits his teeth through a cough as he uses Merlin's shoulder to lever himself upright.
"You're hurt," Merlin says, stupidly, obviously, because Arthur is still putting far too much weight on him in order to stand.
"I'm fine; it's nothing," Arthur says, but he staggers even as he says it. A horse cuts in front of them both, and Merlin readies another magic bolt against the threat; but it's Morgana, in battle dress.
"Give me Arthur," she commands. "Go pull down Mordred's standard. He is fallen and his army will pull back when they see that."
She pulls Arthur up onto the horse in front of her, and it's worrying the way Arthur does not protest the indignity of riding like an idiot or an invalid. Morgana pivots the horse away, and Merlin uses magic to snatch the standard from atop its pike. Merlin may trample it into the mud of the battle field with a little more vigour than is strictly necessary.
Merlin turns as the battle starts to disengage. Ten meters away, Morgana rears the horse, and has it bring its full weight down on someone who'd sidled up to try to take advantage of the horse's double burden. Merlin can hear the impact from where he stands. For an instant, she looks like a goddess of war, with her hair so dark and her skin so pale. And then she's off across the field to the castle again, Mordred's army breaking around her, and Arthur's own falling back in steppes as a rear-guard; and Morgana is just the King's adopted sister, riding urgently home.
~
“The baby, I think we’ll keep it,” Gwen tells Arthur one morning. She’d been showing for a few weeks, but no one had said anything for fear of a jinx or a curse or just atrocious luck. It was not a good time for Albion, and pregnancies were always so chancy in the early months: so easy to lose the child, so easy to lose the mother. Acknowledging the pregnancy meant that the most uncertain time had passed, that Gwen might bear to term.
“We’ll have a girl!” Arthur says, clearly delighted. “With a smile like her mother’s.” Arthur wants a girl so he can learn to dote on a child, afraid his experiences with Uther will overwhelm if he doesn't practice first. Arthur grew into a good man because his father was one, at his heart, but he doesn’t want his children to have to dig for that certainty. Morgana was a good woman despite Urther’s worst mistakes.
Morgana’s expression goes strange and distant for a moment, as though she’s listening very hard to something far away. “It’s a boy,” she says.
“But I want a girl. Merlin, make it so,” Arthur says, mock petulant and playful in a way none have seen him be in many months-not since Mordred had brought active war to their gates.
“Shouldn’t you want a boy?” Gwen asks him, before Merlin can say it doesn’t matter, that magic doesn’t work that way. “Take care of the succession early and not have to worry about things as your father did?”
“We’ll have time for succession later,” Arthur tells her, and all their laughter rings like bells through the castle’s stone halls.
“Name it Morgan,” Merlin says, solemn, not joining them in their cheer, and Morgana, Arthur, and Gwen laugh all the harder for his dour delivery of the suggestion that they name the child for brightness.
~
Mordred will not take peace. Arthur continues to sue for it, long after even his most trusted advisors have abandoned the course, saying it will only make him look weak.
“It will make me look like I want peace,” Arthur retorts. “We will press the battle no less fiercely for it. Let them come if they think us weak.” And Arthur fights more fiercely than any other person on the field of battle, hounding Mordred so sorely it is difficult to remember who has laid siege to whom.
~
Albion flourishes under Arthur. It was a prosperous kingdom under Uther; he cared about his people and their ability to make a living in the trades they chose. Under Arthur, Albion comes into its golden age, as the dragon had tempted or promised Merlin so long ago.
Years pass, and Arthur marries Gwen in the winter, despite all the traditions and superstitions it flies directly in the face of.
"She's not nobility," Arthur laughs if pressed about it, "So I doubt summer-luck will have much bearing either." He says it with a lot of bravado, but Gwen remembers anxious days spent in consultation with Morgana about how much of the tradition about summer marriages from the old religion had a real practical purpose, and how much was irrelevant and could be done without.
Enough, it turns out. What speaks to Morgana most is that no one in the castle, none of the courtiers, none of the ladies or knights grumble or complain at this departure from the way things always were; no one has anything to say about traditions or laws or expectations, the ones that Uther had understood so well and that a much younger Arthur had felt so constrained by.
More than that, no one at all, not just the ladies and lords titled for merit, but the old ones as well, and the servants and vassals so long concerned by propriety, spoke a word against Gwen's coronation, making a peasant a Queen in power as well as name.
~
Arthur sends for Morgana as his father lies on his deathbed. He is dying. Gaius says there is nothing that can be done. You loved him once, and I think he loves you still, in his own misguided way. Please come, reads the note he sends out. Arthur isn't sure if she will come or not, but he hopes.
"She has worked for years for the downfall of this kingdom!" his advisors--Uther's advisors--shout at him. "She has tried to kill Uther with her own hand!"
"She is as much a daughter to Uther as I have been a son. She will have a place here if she wants it, for it is hers already."
"Your father the King has banished her a traitor!"
"Yes, he did," says Arthur, and that is the end of it.
Morgana does come. Uther, dying, does not remember all the bad blood, does not remember her betrayal, her banishment. He does not remember much clearly near the end. Instead, he remembers better, earlier days, and he grasps her hand weakly in his own, and says, "Morgana. You grow more beautiful every day. Your father would be proud to see- I- The best thing that has ever happened to me is to have had you in my court, as family." And Morgana, once so angry she was unmoved by his clear happiness and relief to have found her whole and alive after a year of searching, cries at his passing.
Not a week after Uther dies, knights begin to converge on Camelot. Some travel hundreds of miles to pledge to Arthur their loyalty. Arthur knights Lancelot and Gawain the day they arrive, and laughs for the first time since his father’s death when Merlin reveals that Gawain had always been a noble, in secret, so the knighting was unnecessary. He knights any of the companions they’d brought with them that aren’t of noble birth as well, trusting his friends’ judgment in character. Arthur keeps training his knights himself, though it’s not the job for a king.
Arthur lifts the ban on magic, but he does not promote Merlin to his official court magician until months later out of a twisted sense of amusement. Then a knight visiting for tournament tries to make Merlin fetch his boots, since he’s just a house servant. It’s funny when Arthur does it on purpose, but unacceptable when it’s accidental, and the next day sees the installment of a magician in Arthur’s court.
Morgana stays, because she is asked to. Morgana knows people gossip about her behind her back in ways they never had when she’d lived there when Uther was king. She knows it’s vicious and malicious and probably more deserved than misinformation and untruth have a right to be. She ignores it and tries to get Gwen to do the same. Arthur has long since realized that trying to confront rumour does nothing but spread it faster, but Gwen has always had a softer heart and takes blows to her loved ones hardest of all. Gauis welcomes her back like a favourite granddaughter, steadfastly ignoring the transgressions of decades and injecting arch counterarguments to any word he hears against her.
Merlin, Morgana tries to avoid as much as possible, because of all the complicated history between them. He’d known to distrust her when no one else thought to suspect, and though her shifted allegiance was born partially out of his betrayal of her, a sacrifice he'd deemed acceptable for the greater good, Morgana cannot blame him if he chooses to mistrust her still. It takes her many months to realize that Merlin holds no magical shields or defenses around her at all; it takes no time after that for Morgana to understand that leaving Arthur unguarded is the same as leaving open a path to Merlin's heart, a trust untold and unrivalable.
It's a new future, one Morgana, Merlin, the dragon would never have been able to predict, something full of hope and home and promise, and it stretches out before them like bright red and gold banners, crisp with wind.